Gregor Mendel: data faker

You’ve probably heard the story of Austrian monk Gregor Mendel who experimented with the breeding of wrinkly peas, but whose research was unfortunately ignored for decades after Darwin until their insights were synthesized together in the twentieth century. What you probably haven’t heard is the allegation dating back to R. A. Fisher that he faked his data. Everyone uses his insights, if not the exact values of all his estimates, so not surprising that gets dropped down the memory hole. The page linked from there quotes some authors saying “[F]or the moralist, no distinction can be made between an Isaac Newton who lied for truth and was right, and a Cyril Burt who lied for truth and was wrong””, which I found amusing because I’d always heard that Burt’s heritability estimates match up fairly well with modern twin-adoption studies.

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9 Responses to “Gregor Mendel: data faker”

I would think that the allegation against Mendel is well-known. It often crops up in discussions about scientific fraud. But it’s interesting that unlike Mendel’s, Burt’s reputation was ruined by allegations of fraud, even though his supposedly fraudulent results have been replicated a number of times.

I’ve read that reanalysis of Burt’s data failed to reveal evidence of intentional fraud — that his errors were random (tending in both directions) and largely the result of sloppiness in his later career. There’s also a book — “Cyril Burt: Psychologist” — that attempts to vindicate his reputation, though I have not read it and don’t know how it was received among field experts.

Mendel didn’t do all of the physical work involved in his research. He got the monks he was in charge of to assist him with the task of emasculating and cross-pollinating the peas – it would have been rather difficult to do that all by himself.

Monks frequently have a well-deserved reputation for quality in exacting, methodical work. Like the Swiss with clockwork.

The attacks on Burt by Leon Kamin and others have been similarly rebutted.

It seems to me that what both Gould’s and Kamin’s attacks on Morton and Burt respectively have in common is an ideological rather than a scientific motivation. Kamin by his own testimony belonged to the Communist Party from 1945 until midl-1950:

The implications of genetics, as it relates to the human race, are incompatible with the Marxist insistence that conditions form consciousness, that consciousness is a blank slate, that there is no such thing as inborn “human nature,” and that all social and economic inequality are therefore products of an unjust and oppressive social order. Gould, Kamin, Lewontin, and other Marxists writing on these topics all display an alarming tendency to allow their ideology to trump their science. As E.O. Wilson wrote of Gould, “He’s willing to denigrate his own field of evolutionary biology in order to downgrade the enemy, sociobiology, which is a small but important branch of evolutionary biology. When Darwin conflicts with Marx, Darwin goes.”